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If the merge operation is commutative the order doesn’t matter.
by butterisgood 6y ago
If the merge operation is commutative the order doesn’t matter.
- ulrikrasmussen 6y agoYes, but the question is whether the semantics is meaningful for the application (e.g. text editing). I can also make string concatenation commutative by generalizing the concept of strings to multisets, but it is not given that this structure is useful for the applications where strings are needed.
- sitkack 6y ago> Yes, but the question is whether the semantics is meaningful for the application (e.g. text editing). CRDTs are building blocks for larger systems. They themselves need to be composed into higher level constructs. I think this is the crux of the CRDT, it assists the application designer in creating an algebra over the domain model such that state can get updated w/o having a single representation of that state space. It pushes that complexity back down, so that we can reason about it in serial code.